Creatine is a substance that turns into creatine phosphate inside the body. You can naturally find it in your muscle cells. However, it’s also possible to get it from some food sources for supplementation.
A compound known as ATP or adenosine triphosphate is what provides energy to your body, allowing it to perform heavy lifting, high-intensity exercises, and other cellular metabolic activities. When creatine turns into creatine phosphate, it helps in the making of ATP.
When engaging in athletic competitions or when exercising, one gets more energy in the muscles necessary for higher performance, thanks to creatine supporting the body’s energy process.
So, should you take creatine to become stronger? What does creatine exactly do? Is it going to benefit your workout routine? This post will try to answer these questions below.
- Improves Cell Signaling
Creatine helps cells in the body to communicate better. This is due to the substance’s ability to increase or improve satellite cell signaling. It’s essential to note that muscle growth and repair are significantly impacted by improvements in cell communication. That said, muscles grow and recover faster during and after workout sessions because of creatine supplementation. Our Fitness Life provides a handy guide to the best creatine supplements in the market, so consider checking that one out.
- Increases Overall Workout Intensity
If you want to build more muscle mass, you understandably have to work out harder. However, it’s easier said than done, and, sometimes, people surrender halfway through their journey towards their fitness goals. By taking creatine supplementation, however, you can keep pushing yourself hard in the gym even at times when you would already have to decrease your exercise load or stop entirely. This only means one thing for you if you’re a bodybuilder–you’re able to build muscle faster since you’re increasing your overall workout intensity.
Supplementing with creatine makes working out easier and building more muscle mass possible. However, please keep in mind that how much intensity you can achieve each and every session still comes down to your willpower. Also, to make sure that you can successfully build muscle mass, you still have to feed yourself with enough calories.
However, that doesn’t take away the fact that supplementing your workout routine with creatine really helps a lot. Don’t overlook its impact, and if you’re one of those who struggle with maintaining enough volume in their exercise program, then, creatine is something that you should really consider trying.
- Improves Athletic Performance
The effects of creatine supplementation may differ from one person to another. Of course, there can be a number of factors why mixed results are achieved. It can be the differences in doses or the accuracy of the specific test utilized to measure performance. Generally speaking, it improves athletic performance. It helps in enhancing soccer performance, jumping height, rowing performance, and tennis players’ serving ability, among others. This a performance-enhancing effect that, of course, will also be beneficial when working out.
- Promotes Cellular Hydration
The performance-enhancing effect of creatine supplementation will be explained by its ability to promote cellular hydration. Muscles can work more efficiently when they retain enough water, and creatine can help make it happen. Creatine, being a performance enhancer, seems appropriate since hydrated muscles really perform better when compared to the dehydrated ones.
- Increases Recovery Rate
As already mentioned, one can quickly and more significantly gain muscles through creatine supplementation since creatine allows a person to train at a higher frequency.
The faster the muscle grows, the more frequently you need to stimulate it. That’s true, yes, but that will only happen if it gets the opportunity to grow back fully after receiving the first stress load. That means your muscles require some recovery time. The good thing about taking creatine is that it helps in increasing the muscle cells’ recovery rate. In return, it decreases the total rest time you require in between workouts.
You can cut the recovery time of your muscles from a few days down to only a single day using creatine. This, over time, translates to more workouts you can accomplish, and will surely make a significant difference in the results you’ll achieve from month to month. So, if you’re someone who struggles with very long recovery periods between workouts, creatine supplementation can be of great help.
- Improves Muscle Growth
One can build more muscle through creatine supplementation because it allows you to achieve increased workout intensity. However, there’s more to what creatine can do in relation to muscle growth. Creatine actually increases the IGF-1 hormone. IGF-1 is essential for muscle growth. That’s why athletes who are training for lean body mass find creatine as the most effective and most reliable ergogenic nutritional supplement in the market.
Conclusion
The list of products for sports nutrition has creatine closely behind protein as the most popular option for athletes. Aside from being backed up by reliable and thorough research, taking creatine supplementation is also convenient. The benefits discussed above should be more than enough to convince you to start incorporating creatine into your workout routine. You won’t know how good it can be for you unless you try it.